Fatherhood in the Last Days:
A Western/Maya Codex
January 16th 2008: Cauac Lahun: Last Day of The Penultimate Cycle
5 ½ years after a Mexican honeymoon, and we have arrived
On the door of parenthood shocked
That both our pipes work just fine.
Bust in to the world 3 ½ hrs flat
Grey and cloaked in wet remembrances
inside the center of comfort, soft insides
growled and grooved around tight home
with their minds set on
release.
Today was the day
you emerged. What about emergence
makes us hold in our breath, waiting
for thinner air to inform paused lungs?
I waited at Olivia’s foot watching for moments:
Looking for head then shoulder then shoulder
Then the whoosh and then out in the big world
Naked like a tsunami survivor from a nudist camp...
Beaten by the struggle to squeeze through to life
At the end of much rushing water and suffocating
Swelling pink waves pushing at your will to unveil
yourself to light and sound and the group waiting
in rooms in hallways at home for the order to drive:
come quickly, all—A new light has illuminated himself,
a new sun has emerged from the belly of mother Earth,
and I stand witness, face to face with the great mystery.
It is now, he has arrived, I have started to understand.
***
The end is 5 tun away starting tomorrow
They say in that old clay
Of moon calendar and dead language ways
Stagnant in the jungle
Of the past, fermenting
In civilization’s techno
Cocktail and disease machine oil provider.
Most Maya nowadays
Hunger more for the new ways and new worth
Than their birth, than their connection to gods.
At pyramid plateau
they stage passion plays:
cultures are viral syndromes;
gringos taking snaps of the old rock
stripping the scene of worth;
old rock faces crippled by false light and white and me, asking
stupid academic questions to Mayan guide at noon in Cozumel.
February 14, 2008: Cib Hun or the Day of Valentines
Gods are love solidified
Into cosmic mothers and
Fathers of electrified light.
Cupid came from the clouds
confused: Plato, Rome, Cicero
All giving different parents to this
Same being. I think Cupid is older
And wiser now than to think human
Taxonomy is an exact science and
Has stopped therapy in favor of Its
addiction to first kisses and babies.
It’s sad to think Hallmark makes so much money
From Cupid’s commercial rendition, even though
I started dating Mom when she worked at Hallmark,
The smell of cards semantically inferior to love’s truth: everything dead
set on fetishism of a deceptive need
To grow complete collections of bears made of clay,
Of ornaments to decorate a stolen tree, of devotion to sugar fix slavery.
I went to war, fell in love, did what I could to resist love
On this date of Valentines. We were expecting you today;
That little bit of novelty we could include with our answer to:
When are you due? And you, baby boy, almost a month early
Now under the covers with your mother listening to familiar beat
Muffled but still present in her chest, inside where you still could be.
Attila the Hun was turned back by St. Leo the Great;
Hun is the number one in the Mayan language. Cib Hun
If you were born today, our
Leo,
a Che-Rub shooting golden bullets.
Substitutes for love exist,
But they ain’t here with you,
Our human cupid angel boy,
Awakening to my eyes reflecting
Your own, smile, stretch, now time
For your bottle, first let’s get that diaper.
Feb 29, 2008: Akb’al Ka: Night House
Angels sometimes come to me like friends and
Impart logical explanations for the way of things.
Gods enter in through open doors after dark—
Shift the cosmic magic. Ecstasius in darkness,
Troubles feel aqueous, analogues of holiness.
The words come slow
At 3am about how this all can be even possible?
It is 4am now in the house of Leo Mann;
Lullaby played in loop by wind up gears.
Akb’al Ka is this year’s strange leaping date.
It is strange to leap
into past incarnations
If I hear the cry of a child. War tremors
Across the surface of soul an atomic blast.
****
I held you to the dark face of my rage;
Gritted teeth and animal howl of being
In two epochs at once and knowing
both
in pain.
Olivia asked me yesterday why I hadn’t filled out your baby book section
Entitled “the father’s hopes for his child.” So I will here:
I hope you are unscathed by life;
I hope you aren’t stupid or overly smart to escape persecution of extremes;
I hope you are more like your mother than me; I hope you see through lies
Better than I have when I trusted in connections like air: I hope this address
Is lost and you never read this poem even though it is yours, for only you. I
Hope like madmen cackle, involuntary and with alien intensity, for all the bliss
The world has to be available to you without pain
Without the hardship without separation from the holy center of the divine mind
Without disillusion and rage for the loss of an imagined control--without the cost.
This Mayan day signifies night,
The safe part of night when a fire is high.
That home in safety of light and the seen.
I hope you feel safe
When I pick you up
From your distress,
To find my heart still
Intact and beating here for you, my boy,
Beating out hopes and fears, same. Beat
Into my chest with balled fists and pulsed
Cry, a revving motorcycle mouth and red
Face squeezing out protest upon protest.
I will remember I am here with you, not there;
I will grow to lose injured memory to fill with your life.
March 15th 2008: Edznab Kan: Stable Knife
Beware my son
The Ides of March.
Caesar granted had
More cause than you,
But what I am saying
Is to watch the middle
Of things carefully; centers
that form such sharp valleys
in the fabric of time as to sever
the underground with obsidian
sharpness, to cut away from all
that is not, be that sure handed in
the real as to forget the mystery.
The middle ground is a knife—it slices my resistance into submission.
Center holds all betrayal in a razor thin black hole, it is the run-off gutter
Of both defining extremes of living. Holy or lowly, the I is eliminated totally,
Homeostatic indifferent existence is the life of ghosts and political moderates.
Brute with jealousy in hand’s
Intention is Brutus standing
on stairs waiting for Caesar
friend to turn his back, and
Pull, stab, twist, Et tu, Brute?
A comet passed over.
It was 44 BC and the Romans ate
Their fill of betrayal, but this one,
a friend with knife in hand for back,
is the gravest of all. Marcus Junius
Brutus snuck
To undue the life of one he loved
Once: when convenience catered
To ego, compliments outweighed
Critique, when it was easy to
be
a friend.
Mayan brutality is demonized;
But I ask you, what is worse?
The Western tradition, Greco-Roman heritage is littered
With men like Brutus: Stab-you-in-the-back-fair-weather
Men that kill like breathing—
Then there are the sacrifices
Of blood and the death games,
Mayans cutting off the head of the game winner mid-court,
Head held to sun like divine godhead magnificence owed.
Holy is sacrifice of life for life;
having a part in decay and rebirth
intimately.
April 1st 2008 : Men Uaxac: Eagles in the Rain
Eliot said April was the cruelest
Of all months. Today spoke symbols.
I was thinking of the
day
in mid may
We found out about you. Even before I knew for sure
I had hives from head to toe. I soaked in oatmeal baths and cursed
Your grandmother to be
For allergy to new
dog--
Be-be
I wonder
if
our bodies
Are just barometers to
Our souls, signed symbols
Of some everlasting connection
To the great plan. I am holy only:
When my mind forgets my body is breathing;
In the moment when fate intersects with bliss.
In the days following your birth when the concept
Of me as father was conjuring itself in a confusion
So profound I was lightheaded and spacey feeling
For weeks. It is awkward
hearing your first tries at language,
The coos and bursting elf-like laughter—your mother says you sound like a goose—because I know
I can’t understand that purity any longer, my language muddied and with my mind.
I fall away from
You and into myself:
I am in the cultural pool’s deep end
Doing backstrokes ‘cause I know soon the ones freestyling always burn out and sink and the doggy paddlers
Are confused with species-orientation and what time really is and the breaststrokers just are fools to think effort
Equals output equals praise equals prizes for prowess and possibly stardom if they just give it that final push to finish.
If I become weary I will float.
Don’t be a fool son;
Not even when you
Are asked to for the
Team. I see so many
Have seen so many
Soldiers throw them
Selves on the fantasy
Grenade in their minds
When dreaming of hero
Welcomes back home,
Even if it’s in a body bag.
Never be convinced as I was when a young man
To think your life is this valueless. Don’t be a Hero;
Heroes all die in their minds many times before they die;
Hero as champion of the State is always a lie.
I talk to you as
If you were older
Than the
Mayan
calendar allows.
In 2012 they say we change into beings of light riding the cosmic
snake into the center of the milky way.
April 19th 2008: Ix Hun: Jaguar Birth
The jaguar familiar is alive
In the spirit of the forest.
The lion of the Amazon hunting green with its black,
Leo lion, in your crib crying; feline predators each
With their own prey. The Jaguar is the symbol of the dead—
For the death it brings the rainforest animals caught unawares.
But your wants are bottles and boobies,
Strange prey. Shrill cries in the morning
Until thirst is satisfied. I need to be clear when I say this next thing—
This date 11 yrs ago I went out with your mother for the first time.
I was non-committal in a comical way, always wanting her around.
She won my heart from the first day since every day of my life I am
And was and will be with her, connected outside of time in our love.
But love is never clear, not for men nor for women.
But this statement is more to the attempted point:
My life before your mother is only a vehicle,
A switch to be flipped in my heart’s life when
My girl talked sweet to me
And let me see it was
OK,
I had found a home in her heart.
May 7, 2008: Chuen Ho: Monkey Empowerment
What in our monkey mind
Made the switch to souled
Individual that stands on two
And makes art for art’s sake?
My father was an artist, powerful
Director of actions and response;
A dramatic life led to love of drama,
Love of the pieces, the moments put
Together to assign existential worth.
He died ten years ago today.
He would have liked your first smiles,
Would have laughed to see you crying
In my arms—remembering his first acts
Of parenthood. I see something of him
In you, something in the brow or eyes
Screams from the Smith side, reverberation
From inheritance of minute morphological traits
That owe more to Peter Mann Smith
than just his middle name reused.
We had a town resident when I was growing up
That kept a chimp on a leash and drove it around
Our block in a horse and carriage: the simian beast
would ring the carriage bell as they passed me waving.
They dressed him like a boy,
I remember Tweed knickers
Revealing hairy legs, a beanie
Made of rainbow, a dress shirt
And bow tie half undone, askew.
If you didn’t look close or were hard of sight,
They looked to be a happy family with a hairy kid.
They would buy him icecream bars from the 5&10.
I drove you by the old house yesterday,
The house that holds 25 years of my life
In the crawl space hostage under the slow
compression of a quarter century lost to endless revision.
I wonder if I am just this simple hairy ape waving and smiling
Just like that
boy-chimp,
ringing the bell with ice cream in hand,
To this ghost who has evolved past worry.
He is transient wanderer into my memory
Of revolving sign and symbol.
I am an anger
Machine in love with worry, son, don’t be like me.
I want you to have enlightenment without the cost,
Is this even possible?
I laughed at your toes today
Playing with the stuffed monkey with the rattle
In its belly—they are long like your mother’s,
Hand-like and strong like fingers are, trying to
Grasp hold to the World.
May 13th 2008: Caban Buluk: Earth Resolution
Your aunts and I would construct banners
For birthdays that
hung
in construction paper
Chains taped with Scotch Tape from the ceiling.
I often think of how it might be to have been brought up
With wealth and luxury. The parties we threw were in backyards
With white, pollen stained and leaf printed, lawn chairs lined in a row.
I have cowered in the face of the rich,
I have held my tongue when abused and scowled at.
I don’t want you to ever cower or crouch or run from any of them.
I don’t see our side ever really winning, our realms are quieter, more reserved
—winning makes no sense to a man like me, the man I hope you will become.
Jesus said it was easier for a camel to walk through the eye
Of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of his father.
It always made sense
Even before experience
Taught truth to live against
A canopy of bluescreen fantasy
That the investment class ain’t got
A snowball’s chance in hell of makin’ it
To heaven. But what about me, slave most my life—
Misfit masking my freak flag for fear of retaliation and
loss of all love I ever accepted as love. I am an alien
who from time to time forgets that I am in fact an alien,
but am reminded at every family function when I try to act normal,
just like a regular joe, even though I’ve seen the other side of the cosmos
on the back of a blue god and a belief in miracles and a golden book of myths.
Your mother is an alien too,
But she hides it better. She
Is the daughter of a star and
You are the sun of our alien
World that we spin around
As mad refugees from some
Nebulous homeland in the heavens.
Your grandfather was born on this date in 1936
To a working class family, Robert and Mary Smith.
Hollow aeons run in cotton web erratic rhisomatic movements
Underneath us all up here on the surface dancing, killing each other,
But when any one of us is
born they enter the world with us--holding
Our heads up to the light at
the end of the tunnel. 72 years
today a man
Became real, took in the air
of his forefathers and foremothers
and began
Dying. I am
convinced of how love seems to transcend
time, and if the love
Mary
and
Robert had for my Dad on his entrance is equal
to the square root
Of
Eternity
then by dictate of
cosmicdivinemathematics, their love lives on still,
Persists
in
frozen bliss, etched in their eternal hearts
the face of your
grandda’s birth.
His
earth
birthdays are ended but my face is etched in his
heart forever,
as yours is on mine. We are all human copiers making photocopies of experience
to carry us all home to bliss in remembrance when it is our time to resolve to leave
earth for forever. Your face will be my spaceship into infinity: your
laugh, your eyes, your
undying signature upon me--my fuel.
June 1st, 2008: Cib Kan: Owl Steadfast
I once saw an owl
With your mother
At the sanctuary.
The wings broad and silent
Wrapped immediacy around
The need to see through lenses
Things most of the world
have
abandoned.
I ask you now before you can answer:
How do we lose the pure and astounding
beauty of Earth’s daily wonders? I ask before
you can answer because all answers are moot.
Once an answer is formulated it is obsolete;
Once one reaches adulthood they are ready
To dying dance their way through all their life
Until they unknowingly crescendo towards
habit’s
demise at the end of time.
Until night, the owl remains motionless in hole of tree,
The body of the waiting bird pulses red dreams of meat.
I wait until night to unmask myself.
Looking out the windows on the quarter hour religiously
Has brought me to an understanding of random happenings,
The ebb and flow of novelty.
At Night I leave my post at the window, the door
To enter dream without my snarl, my twisted façade
Forged in the circus furnaces of War and Addiction;
Without my polite smile, my appreciative head
Nod, my understanding eyebrow wrinkle;
Dropping my healthy posture, my attentive eyes, my sniffing the air for approaching danger
For my real face that I keep locked
Inside my dream’s potential waiting
For night’s cover to camouflage truly how strange
Truth seems to daylight’s practiced, public faces.
It rained this day 6 years ago,
The shower darkened everything.
I raced away into the kitchen crying
About a ruined day, a ruined outside wedding reception.
I realized far too late
My faces were made
Of vapor and necessity
Of drama to amuse my
dancing crying clown soul.
Your mother is the only one
The only one
The only one
I ever showed inside
My solitude. I let her
Pick up faces from the gallery,
Try them on, feel the intensity
of my internal screams set loose
on her purity like an infection; yet,
She stayed and became me time and time again
As I showed her the rarest of my faces on back shelves of the gallery
Attempted to scare her with some, shock, scare away into memory; yet,
She stayed to take all I dished out and more, unseen
Consequences to an incremental training in madness resolute on growing madness,
My new life born in the fear of losing the only one to ever know me as I truly am. My secret of i.
July 6, 2008: Chuen Oxlahun: Time Weaver Transcendence
In Maya myth, the monkey is called the Time weaver and
The number thirteen is Oxlahun, cosmic completion--transcendence.
Son, we are the makers of our own destiny
No longer. Our destiny has its own life today
Of pure intent
A mind and heart
A rose red center
A vivisection of our journey
Transmitted by ghosts in radio waves
at low frequencies where even dead air can hide from the noise of itself.
How many hours did I lose at the working end of a bottle?
Replace wet self with dry self, but still taste buds are on guard
For that cue to
Run down the row of eternal bottles again in a suicide pace.
I see you today as a prize
For disposing of that side
Of myself hell bent on dying.
Now here with you in crib crying
Out melodies of why I quit; to have
This life instead of a drowned life sulking
About unfortunate turns, signing up for sands, betrayed ideas of right and wrong.
Three years is quite a stretch
When taste buds are trained to salivate
At every crack of a beer bottle, every glug of a pour.
Even if I had the right words
Would I use them here, when so close to the center
Of my sickness? Avoidance is the true art of addicts.
I want to be sentimental
I want to remember all the good times drinking beer
Drinking wine
Drinking scotch and water
Drinking summer gin and tonic cocktails of white smooth clear
inebriation
Drinking shots of tequila in Mexico out of a bottle with no worm
Drinking whiskey in a crystal tumbler wearing a rental and smoking
cigars.
Drinking ouzo and opium in Iraq with republican guard defectors with
orange juice
Drinking myself to sleep every night since returning stateside
Up until three years ago.
Boy, I will never drink again, and that’s final.
I will build no more
Memories in vapor.
August 14, 2008: Courageous Creation
Create me one tomorrow from a lifetime plus a day
In the image of my Grandfather on my mother’s side.
My oldest uncle said to me in an odd rhetorical question at my Nonna’s 90th,
“You know, Damon, you are the first to go to war since my father?”
The flag for him shares the flag for my father
In the glass cabinet in the sitting room of Mom's house.
A picture also: Grandda
On the beach in the South Pacific in smoked
Cigar swirling clouds that looked as if borrowed
from some dragon’s scene on a silk kimono.
I knew him for a year and a half before he died
And my mother is fond of saying how she snuck
Me in to see him when he was on his final march.
One of the last things Nonna showed me—
When still together enough—
Where letters from her Harry during the War.
They were written in long script, not unlike my own,
With a soldier’s voice illuminated in his love for Carmela.
I wrote letters to few during my short stay
In the fire fields of warring metal monsters,
Because it felt like the air of a distant planet
That could never dry the ink of immediate experience
Enough for it to hold. I never wanted to write home
Because they all seemed like suicide notes, goodbyes;
Every letter strained out my clenched teeth, every word a void.
How could your great granddad think enough to write of love
When the war loomed above his pen an unwelcome shadow?
My pen writes with war ink; dark red-black of dried pools of bloodletting ink.
I might not have been as able
To say that warring me was in fact me,
And not some B movie actor playing me
Stuck behind enemy lines and hungry for home,
For a home he forgets the details of
On the other end of night
Where his ghost parents and phantom sisters
still haunted his invisible hometown house.
It is different for the enlisted though.
It is easier to get lost in folly, create
Yourself as otherworldly in the rush
Of blood pump activation that dopes
Our bodies into temporary transience
Between this world and the other
that
if
Dispatched it would be just a hop to heaven, a leap into hell.
Sept 5 2008: Eb Bolon: circle in the grass
The spores left by experience
Migrate down and inward,
Create that web of underground
Life’s kinetic emergence,
And show us that karma is reality
Served on a slice of fate.
Son, I want replaced the rules that say
Your father is a criminal
For having seen the inside of the machine
And knowing for sure the wrench is built-in;
Laws that lock up my brethren in cells and
Use blind morality as an
Inquisitor binding rope
Made from human skin
Around the voice box.
Of America. When will all those sharp dressing
Anchors and investigative reporter shows with
Their edgy lead in music actually think to speak
For me, the lines of people in shackles, and wait
For the nation’s response to ever broadcast again?
I want my sorted history erased with these damning rules and laws.
I humped through briar and pine
Of southern Cali national parks,
Snuck around in cammo and ammo,
Accepted pay for mercenary work
Patrolling nature for that evil green.
You will see in pictures
Your daddy painted and armed
Hanging my feet out a Huey carefree.
Nap of the earth and I’m holy in ecstasy-wind-release,
Pilot hitting skids on tips of towering evergreen trees.
We painted green men were missiles
deployed to destroy life giving green
grass with extreme mindless prejudice.
Eb is the Mayan sign for grassy road—
Roads were few and when they were
they were dirt and dust and circled mountains of more dirt and pine.
No easy way to have a guilty conscience at 21
while marching and climbing and laying in wait;
no reason to see reason instead of the buck fifty
danger pay and comfort of being at war with something evil again.
The US Army has shown me much too much to hate it
I dare say in the same way an abused child still loves.
The green has saved my inside self
From dying, and by this alchemical
miracle
my soul has been saved
To ride the light of time to you now and that now toothy grin.
I rose today feeling like a see-saw,
Irritated by the class I was preparing
on censorship and then looking to you
climbing the rails of your crib grabbing
for the mobile spinning music into the room.
Anything can be healed
Inside this moment, I thought;
Here are frozen snapshot
Dreams of an ideal self
In the felt presence of now—
I am a stone sitting, singing my life to you...
You are life.
October 31 2008: Lamat Oxlahun: Rabbit Star Ascension
You were a lion today
That lost his roar midway
Through trick or treating—
heavy eyes in the October night.
I looked
both ways when placing you in the car,
as if some phantom would swoop down
and pluck you from the world—snatch
you back into the stars from which you came—
but you protested my paranoid delusional scene
with a cry and a struggle with the straps of the car seat.
Nonnie forewent her annual drink for your Greatgranddad
Who died today 35 years ago in a hospital in Wilmington,
And we sat instead with seltzer and juice in pilsner glasses
for me—
40 months sober and irritated to salivation when I smell
the vapor come from a bottle, a mouth, a newlystainednapkin.
Never be possessed by ghosts—
Have them drive you underneath yourself
And open up the veins of suicide possibility—
Burrow into their phantom faces
instead
with the truth of you.
November 5, 2008: Ben Ho: Leading the Way to Love
Late last night we witnessed history—
You curled up on your mother’s arm
Sleeping through all the speeches and cheers.
I wished I could be as carefree as you,
Not fearful in a world dead set on running
The clock out. A child’s lack of concern for chaos
Is certainly an un-affordable bliss for adults—isn’t it?
I wish I didn’t care what puppet plays father
In this big country, care what lies I choose to
Consume or what party matches my ethical façade.
Your mother woke up 33 today
And went to work with a new
found hope for your tomorrow.
She is so beautiful when she hopes,
Dreams, loves everyone angelically.
Almost like a child she wants for peace
In this quickly combusting world, in this
country,
in me.
That is the hope that brought you here
That sobered me, stole back some sanity from my demons…
Made me to see myself as father clear enough for it to happen—you to happen,
And in this new day I feel immersed in her hope, in her love for a world that is
Easy to hate, in this ever changing tempo of our holy, novel dance through life.
November 27, 2008: Men Hun: Eagle Envy on Thanksgiving
I ate my last meat today: a thin slice of turkey and gravy,
a skinny line of skin golden brown basted and crisp.
I thought of the animal I was eating, if it knew of the
annual
sacrifice
Like prophets know of the sacrifices to be still given to time
by the human machine. I thought of myself as a young Tom
plucked from the gaggle of white and red
chaos to be forced down a metal box head first only to find
my eyes staring up at my decapitated body. I ate it
anyway.
I prayed
with the family around this unfortunate creature--a shoe in,
Franklin thought, for the job of
National Symbol. But
alas,
no.
The eagle clutching arrows, clutching branches of peace
Is our holy national symbol, our identity of freedom and strength
Just out of reach of us ground dwellers--and this sad sacrificial turkey.
There are lessons to be learned
In what symbols we pick to stand
For our institutions and identities.
I have never seen a wild bunch fly, though I hear they can in a pinch.
I have seen them walk through vineyards in the afternoon in October;
I have stopped the car to call your mother and tell her to hurry to meet us;
And I have stood in the ditch watching them through binoculars, holding you.
I wouldn’t have minded if Franklin got his way
And gave up the national symbol to this gaggle;
I wonder if they would still be eaten on a bloody
Thursday in November where families thank God
Around the sacrifice of their larger family? Maybe,
still? Still, this thin slice of meat is bitter with anthropomorphized turkey conjurations:
(my first bite)
my first vision a young man-turkey thanking his farmer for not chopping his head off
which so enabled him to pursue and attain his college degree in Vegetarian Cuisine;
(my second bite)
my second vision a family of turkey people waiting for a monolith clock
held by an enormous American eagle flying over concentration camp cages
to countdown to Thanksgiving day, to a November afternoon holocaust.
Passive poultry gazing up;
(my last bite)
the last vision as I finish this white slice is that of you, as young
turkey, being taken for tender breasts and wings, your body
being taken into the last moment of your life with not even a year of
air in you. Your young mass held up
as
holy, burnt offering to today
(this is impossible to swallow).
December 22, 2008: Ahau Oxlahun: Light Way to the Solstice
You were angelic and holy in the morning
When I had not slept;
On the phone with your Nonnie until 3:43am
Then on into cloudy morning
That felt like night still, but still I knew it
Had come, that turning point
That means light would from then on grow
Until spring once again held hold to our side
Of the Earth. And this is the remedy for loss,
To be held against the light of necessity for growth.
And how you have grown, weeks before your day
Showing us wobbling words and aborted tries at walking;
I held my breath as the first steps were
taken,
exhaling as you fell.
Why do I rush things that should not be
rushed?
What do I think I am
Running to, each moment a finish line?
Enough
already! Slow down
Long enough to see the felt presence of immediate experience, be
immersed
in
Now.
This is hard for a recovering Narcissist.
I should be learning from you, my sleeping boy, how to dream without intention:
I shall watch you until you awake and take notes by the promise of growing day
On how to become closer to the center of the center of the expanding
universal
Soul.
December 24 2008: Ik Ka: Dying in Dualities
Birth and death are the same thing, Leo,
don't let your teachers tell you different;
waiting for a birth and waiting for a death
we always stare into that void, either/or,
try to squint eyes just right to see holiness.
When I waited for you
it was most days in panic
of the where and when the
how, and then the if's and the or's
and the hypothetical why me's when
you had been chosen not to enter the world.
Around Christmas Eve last year I had it with family,
this year surrounded by family and the wonder of
a babies first Christmas. We call Uncle Bob to wish
him a Happy Birthday, he sounds like your grandfather
especially when he laughs hard or is telling a bad joke.
We are here with you, my analogous savior born to free
me from my mental shackles, a grand emancipator from
the waking dreams of horror that flash like floods
into my life's quiet but waiting valley of normalcy.
I went to war after Christmas R&R leave,
my last image of family was around a festive
Table, Me in my uniform at midnight mass:
green man among the pine and holly leaves.
I just kept staring at that crucified image, the passion play
carvings on the walls, the slow procession of cars outside
illuminating the stained glass with headlights and taillights,
all listening to the moaning monotone chanting of Deacon
giving signal for the choir to ready their voices
for
a response.
With that image I marched onto a civilian plane
with weapons in the belly and weapons in seats
breathing erratically, both waiting to be
deployed
to war.
January 1, 2009: Oc Lahun: Brave New Manifestation
I was holy in the morning,
You in the nursery w mom,
and here is what I have
learned from my visions:
friends are like water;
love is like a mad river.
parents are like soul copiers;
siblings are like soul mirrors.
All eyes are holy.
All minds want a return to the cosmic womb.
All the money in the world is just paper and metal.
All is all is all is all. We are dust that has learned
To amuse itself with time; we are all a linked procession.
War is a perverted play on this procession
Where the links in the chain pretend to possess
The ability to kill and cannibalize each other:
An illusion reliant on special effects and explosions.
I hold no more now
Than I have ever held
inside the eternal cistern
of my holy, glowing heart of hearts.
January 16, 2009: Chiccan La Ka: Talking to an Ouroboros
So! This thought
of
return
is really
Remedy
for
longing for
Home base contact.
And!
It is central
To a
nomad’s
life lived
In exile
from
the whole
Story as
told
by history
Of how we
are
but dust in
Remission,
pawn
pieces place
In sacrifice
spaces
waiting for time
To do us in. How
is
a nomad like me
Ever going to
know
home agian. Why
Does the world
seem
as if it is sick of me
When I have just
got
used to being in body?
This is not the end by
a mile or a
millennium
But it sure feels
dire
sitting in a dunking
tank
Chair above a
shark
with a smirk on his face.
I have battled this
flow
towards ruin many a day
When demons
triumph
and angels bleed. Need
birthed my reinvention
and your entrance, now
I am here at your
year
celebration with all these
Proud uncles and
aunts
grandmum and mommy
The cakes laid out
before
you to taste first sweets
Candles lit and waiting
for
wishes and extinguishing
And the glow of
ancestors
from two families gathering
Above the scene
wishing
wonder and love of the mystery
Into your life and
offering
their protection to your lighted way.
I wanted to give
testament
to holygenetics and
humanmemetics,
Hand over some small thing to you, some legacy of inheritance. This poem,
These words, moments transcribed in a Mayan wild goose chase
Through time; I leave everything I am to you, today, on your first Birthday,
All my knowledge and the resulting pain, all my love and the sum total
Of learned hate, all my indecision and hardship as your surrogate,
All of my souls voice and breadth, All of my air, blood,
And all of my angels victorious over my demons
And my beating heart, my eyes, my ears,
Absolutely my everything--my holy
Name, my spirit’s signature.
.